A radiation monitor indicates 114.00 microsieverts per hour near the building housing the Fukushima plant's No. 4 reactor, centre, in March of 2013.Issei Kato
/ Associated Press

A Tokyo Electric Power Corp.'s official (centre) stands in front of journalists at the H4 tank area, where radioactive water leaked from a storage tank last August at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Japan.Kimimasa Mayama
/ AFP/Getty Images

A dying sea star is shown in Howe Sound in September in a photo provided by the Vancouver Aquarium. People were quick to conclude that radiation was the reason, but sea stars have died in large numbers even before the Japan disaster.Vancouver Aquarium
/ CP

Environmentalist David Suzuki raised alarm bells about the threat to North America's west coast from Fukushima, but later told The Province he regrets what he said.Mark Blinch
/ Canadian Press

The Japanese earthquake and tsunami of March 2011 is still being discussed three years later, particularly in relation to the catastrophic meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Faced with a lack of available official information on Fukushima and its effects, millions have tried to educate themselves on the Internet. People’s Facebook feeds are suddenly awash with alarming news and confusing YouTube videos. Some have even sworn off seafood.

Almost three years after the meltdown, there has been a recent tidal wave of Fukushima stories — some true, some half-true, and some outright falsehoods.

Stories of men with Geiger counters strolling radioactive beaches in California, fearful warnings from respected public figures, and toxic fish tales are spreading around the globe like plumes of radiation on the currents of social media.

Are you freaked out by Fukushima?

Are you not sure what to think? Neither were we, so we went to the people who should know, to separate the science from the science fiction.

Here are five Fukushima fears you may be wondering about, answered by the experts — including nuclear physicists, oceanographers, marine biologists, a public health expert, an internationally-renowned energy analyst and a couple of sushi chefs.

THE MAP OF DOOM

You may have seen this arresting image online. You may have even shared it on Facebook.

This map, supposedly showing radiation spreading across the ocean from Japan, was one of the most widely spread pieces of Fukushima (mis) information — it was also one of the easiest myths to debunk. We just went to the source.

The map was produced by the American government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. Reached at the NOAA’s Washington, D.C.-area offices, spokeswoman Keeley Belva confirmed the map does not show the spread of radiation.

According to their website: “This image was created by NOAA’s Center for Tsunami Research and graphically shows maximum wave heights (in centimetres) of the tsunami generated by the Japan earthquake on March 11, 2011. It does NOT represent levels of radiation from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant.”

The map has become “an oceanographer’s in-joke,” according to Robin Brown, manager of ocean sciences for Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Two months ago, Brown gave a seminar to 40 DFO oceanographers and presented a slide showing the infamous NOAA map with the headline “West Coast Fried by Radiation.” The room of scientists laughed out loud, Brown said, but their chuckles were “tinged with a bit of sadness.”

“I felt so sorry for NOAA,” he said. “It’s a bit of a cautionary tale about how your good work could possibly show up in a place you didn’t expect.”

The Bottom Line: It’s a real map, but it doesn’t show radiation.

IS IT SAFE TO EAT THE SUSHI?

If Vancouverites start talking about avoiding sushi, there must be something dramatic going on.

“I do get a lot of questions from customers,” said Keith Allison, chef and manager of Sea Monstr Sushi in Gastown.

“On Monday, I had a customer saying, ‘How’s it been? How’s that Fukushima thing going?’ ” Allison said last week.

Allison, who was born in Hokkaido, Japan and raised in Vancouver, said he’s noticed the rumours picking up recently, and when business slowed down in recent months, he wondered if Fukushima concerns could be a factor. Business is still OK, Allison said, but they’re selling more vegetarian items and less seafood, even though most of the fish they sell is from B.C., not Japan.

Local scientific testing of seafood is being done. A team of scientists from Oregon State University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association tested 70 pounds of tuna caught off the U.S. west coast and found trace amounts of Fukushima radiation, but “nowhere near enough to be concerned about food safety.”

OSU’s Delvan Neville, a co-investigator on the project said: “To increase their normal annual dosage of radiation by just one per cent, a person would have to eat more than 4,000 pounds of the highest (radiation) level albacore we’ve seen.”

Dr. Erica Frank, a physician and public health expert at UBC, has heard the fears around seafood and wishes the Canadian government would do a better job communicating with the public.

“My assessment is that right now, public alarm is greater than actual public health risk,” she said, adding that she has been trying to get food testing data from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency for more than a year. She said that after Fukushima, she feels less confident about eating Pacific seafood now, and has completely stopped eating any seafood from Asia.

“This is an opportunity for them to demonstrate credibility in a way that is thoroughly needed,” she said. “When you get people nervous and having dinner-table conversations, and the government is not quelling those fears, that is when you lose that credibility.”

The CFIA conducted special tests in 2011 and 2012 for radioactive material in domestically caught seafood. All those results, which are available on the CFIA website, were well below action limits, according to the CFIA.

The agency continues to monitor the situation, according to spokeswoman Rachael Burdman, but has determined that further testing of “domestic food products for the presence of radioactive material is not required.”

“The CFIA would take immediate action if it was determined that any food samples represented a potential health risk to consumers,” Burdman said in an email.

The Bottom Line: There is no discernible Fukushima-related risk in eating seafood, especially if it’s locally caught. If you want to be extra cautious, avoid fish from Japan.

WHAT DID SUZUKI SAY?

One of the most dire and widely shared Fukushima warnings came in October from one of Vancouver’s favourite scientific sons.

Dr. David Suzuki, speaking at the University of Alberta, said: “I have seen a paper which says that if in fact the fourth (nuclear) plant goes under in an earthquake and those rods are exposed, it’s bye-bye Japan and everybody on the west coast of North America should evacuate,” he said. “If that isn’t terrifying, I don’t know what is.”

In that 140-page paper, an international group of authors reports that “the worst-case scenario” if the fuel pool of Fukushima’s Unit Four collapses in the future, it could require “evacuation of up to 10 million people in a 250-km radius of Fukushima, including a significant part of Tokyo.”

It’s a frightening warning, but there’s no mention of evacuating the west coast.

The Province reached out to the lead author of that report, the France-based nuclear energy analyst Mycle Schneider, who has been a critic of nuclear energy during his long career.

“I’m indeed a little confused about David’s statement,” Schneider told The Province. “To be very clear, I have never seen any credible source for a scenario implying the evacuation of the west coast of North America. In fact, much of the attitude of people on the west coast — like no more swimming in the ocean — seems utterly disconnected from reality.” Speaking from his office in Paris last week, Schneider said: “I’m really, really shocked about the way it’s being discussed in Canada. It’s just totally insane.”

Asked to clarify his comments, David Suzuki replied to The Province by email to say his October statement was “an off-the-cuff response.”

He said he knew his speech was being recorded, but didn’t know it would end up on the Internet.

“I regret having said it, although my sense of potential widespread disaster remains and the need for an urgent international response to dealing with the spent rods at Fukushima remains,” Suzuki said.

The Bottom Line: According to nuclear physicists, there’s never been a warning about evacuating the west coast.

“Crazy talk,” said Dr. Chris Mah, a sea-star expert and researcher at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History based in Washington, D.C.

Mah first broke the story of B.C.’s mass sunflower starfish die-off in September 2013. He said it’s not clear what’s causing the “starfish-wasting syndrome,” but he highlights facts that make a direct relationship to Fukushima seem extremely unlikely.

He points to the syndrome also being observed in the ocean off North America’s east coast, that other organisms in the region, including seaweed, fish and barnacles, seem to be in perfect health and perhaps most compellingly, Mah said, starfish-wasting syndrome was recorded in B.C. three years before the Fukushima nuclear accident.

But it’s not only sea stars. People have tried to link Japanese radiation to depleted salmon stocks, deformed whales and even a spike in miscarriages in the Pacific Northwest.

“It’s a very human thing to do. This is what we do as humans to try and process information. We see something unusual, and we try and match it up with something else unusual that happened at the same time,” Brown said. “But the thing about correlations is they may or may not represent cause and effect.”

The Bottom Line: It may be human nature to want to explain the unexplainable by connecting events — but that’s not how science works.

ARE OUR BEACHES BEING FRIED WITH RADIATION?

A YouTube clip made the rounds last month in which an unidentified man claims to find “shocking” levels of radiation on a California beach using a hand-held geiger counter.

The clip has now racked up more than 700,000 views, and caught the attention of the California Department of Public Health.

In January, DPH inspectors visited the same area.

The radiation levels found were close to those shown in the video, said California DPH spokeswoman Wendy Hopkins, but added those radiation levels are “due to naturally occurring materials and not radioactivity associated with the Fukushima incident.”

Dr. Krzysztof Starosta, a nuclear scientist and associate professor at SFU, explained that a Geiger counter just doesn’t work that way.

“What they’ve seen is natural radioactivity,” said Starosta. “There’s no way the Geiger counter on the West Coast could detect anything remotely related to Fukushima.”

The DFO regularly tests sea water off of our coast, sending a vessel off Vancouver Island’s western coast three times a year with scientists looking for isotopes of cesium-134.

“The important thing about cesium-134 is that you can be certain that it came from Fukushima,” said DFO’s Robin Brown. “Because all other sources of cesium-134, primarily from weapons testing and Chernobyl, will all have decayed.”

In June 2011, three months after the meltdown, no traces of cesium-134 were found. The following year, trace amounts were detected, but only at the westernmost testing point — 1,500 km west of Vancouver Island.

By June 2013, the Fukushima radiation was detected closer to the B.C. coast, but still well below the limits of human concern.

The Bottom Line: Measurable amounts of isotopes from Fukushima have travelled across the Pacific. But you will receive a more substantial dose of radiation during a an airplane flight — from normal cosmic radiation — than swimming off the coast of Tofino.

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